See Cannabis-Approved Out of Home Media on AdQuick

Many cannabis brands struggle with navigating the advertising regulations specific to their industry (both at the state and federal level). Our new feature solves the pain-point of identifying compliant OOH inventory.

See Cannabis-Approved Out of Home Media on AdQuick

There's a pattern that's all too common in the cannabis industry – brands build incredible products, services or marketplaces, invest a lot of time developing memorable copy and creative for their out of home campaigns, but then hit a hurdle when it comes to navigating the regulations on where cannabis can be advertised.

Today, we're excited to launch an awesome feature to help our customers in the cannabis industry (and their agency partners) make identifying media placements easy and compliant with regulations.

Goodbye Google Maps, Hello Cannabis Filters

AdQuick Cannabis 

With our new cannabis-friendly media feature, we’ve done all the heavy lifting to eliminate the three worst pain points cannabis brands face when planning their out of home campaign:

  • sourcing location data for restricted physical locations
  • measuring the distance from restricted physical locations to every piece of OOH media in their campaign
  • identifying neighborhoods where at least 71% of the audience is reasonably expected to be 21 years of age or older.

How we built it

At the time of writing, ten states (+ D.C.) permit recreational cannabis usage.

Each of those states have unique restrictions on advertising cannabis goods and services using out of media.

After a bit of research, we identified that regulations typically fall within one of two buckets:

1. placing an ad within a certain distance of a school, park, or church
2. placing an ad in an area where less than 71.6% of the population is over the age of

So here are the steps we took to build a filter to identify cannabis-compliant advertising locations.

1. Sourcing location data for restricted physical locations

First, we reached out to our friends at Safegraph to help us source geo-location data for the restricted locations.

Safegraph's Places dataset consists of almost every physical location in the U.S. It's a massive dataset (5 million+ locations).

Most importantly, each record (location) in the dataset included its building's geo-coordinates and classifies it with an industry classification (NAICS) code.

We then baked the places data into AdQuick.

2. Measuring the distance from restricted physical locations to every piece of OOH media

After ingesting the data into our backend, we ran distance calculations from 1,235,926 points of interest (such as schools, colleges, parks, etc..) to 84,477 out of home placements in the states where recreational use is legal.

Typically, media planners do this on a one-by-one basis with Google Maps.

This disqualified about one-third of the locations in our data set (84,477 pieces of inventory in recreational cannabis states.

3. Identifying neighborhoods

We knew that another restriction to advertising cannabis products on OOH is percentage that they cannot be shown in areas where less than 71% of the audience is reasonably expected to be 21 years of age or older.

We used our API integration with GeoPath to query the % of population under the age of 21.

This disqualified approximately 1% of locations.

Most areas that fell under this demographic were disqualified in the previous step.

For out of home locations that are not audited by GeoPath, we layered in the most used the most recent Census survey data to get an understanding of each zip codes.

This approach disqualified less than 1% of remaining locations.

4. Verifying the work of the algorithm

Our account management team uses our system to communicate with thousands of media owners to gather additional human-curated intelligence on specific boards and continuously audit the work of the algorithm.

Conclusion

We think our cannabis filter feature will make out of home media planning  for cannabis brands and the agencies a breeze.

Interested in learning more about we can help your cannabis brand with out of home?

Give us a shout!